1. Field of the Invention (Technical Field)
The present invention relates to transporting secondary experiments to and from orbit inside a reusable launch vehicle. More particularly, the present invention relates generally to the access to space attributes hardware innovation with supporting repeatable transportation, transfer and attachment of payloads to a variety of space transportation vehicles for the research, testing and the production of products in microgravity including the return of products to earth for profit.
2. Description of the Related Art
Note that the following discussion refers to a number of publications by author(s) and year of publication, and that due to recent publication dates certain publications are not to be considered as prior art vis-a-vis the present invention. Discussion of such publications herein is given for more complete background and is not to be construed as an admission that such publications are prior art for patentability determination purposes.
The transportation of cargo to space is expensive. The secondary payload hardware has mass and minimum volume. Transporting the internal secondary payload hardware to and from orbit in an affordable manner is a goal consistent with life cycle costs and efficient logistics operations. The problem is the cost of the individual operations required to transport cargo to orbit. The part of the transportation operation can be addressed by the emerging reusable launch vehicles. Kistler Aerospace's secondary payload hardware research and development has proposed various additional aerospace structures and opened a new area of technology and commercial secondary payload hardware accommodation. Secondary payload hardware structures are a refined technology within the aerospace community. Unmanned activities in space are less expensive than manned activities. The unmanned aerospace reusable launch vehicle (RLV) can provide the secondary payload hardware technologies to smooth this process.
The traditional approach to manifesting of space launch systems has been hardware intensive, safety driven and long duration scheduling activities. The emerging commercial technologies point another way and attempt to be sensitive to commercial customer's launch on demand requirements.
The present invention uses the emerging technologies to create hardware and procedures of a commercial nature. These secondary payload hardware systems start the process of lowering the cost of space activities by creating a commercial system using space for commercial gain and supported by affordable transportation.
Accordingly, it can be appreciated that there is a great need for a cost effective, reliable, efficient, and safe hardware systems using integrated technologies containing subsystems common with the reduced cost hardware solutions. The present invention provides this and other advantages, as will be apparent from the following detailed description and accompanying figures.